Beyond Nationalist Frames

Relocating Postmodernism, Hindutva, History
The political context in which the historian of India finds himself today, says Sumit Sarkar, is dominated by the advance of the Hindu Right and globalised forms of capitalism. Simultaneously, the historian’s intellectual context is now dominated by the marginalisation of all varieties of Marxism and an academic shift to cultural studies and postmodern critiques. In this scenario, how may a thinking historian who retains an unfashionable commitment to socialist-feminist values, alongside a democratic political vision formulated within Indian conditions of skewed social development, practice the craft of history? This excellent set of essays collectively constitutes Sumit Sarkar’s answer to this central question. The ‘Hindu Bomb’, the history of relations between communities, the issue of religious propagation and conversion, ideas of nation and woman in Tagore’s fiction, and the relationship of left-wing historiography to postmodern ideas are some of the themes critically analysed in this major collection.